The US announced a new $225m weapons package for Ukraine aimed at shoring up the country’s air defence systems as deadly Russian missiles and drones continued to hit Ukrainian cities.
Half a dozen European Union countries were looking at ways to censure Hungary after Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s freewheeling diplomacy took him on visits to Russia, Ukraine and Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
An initiative to deliver a million drones to Ukraine by next February was moving ahead as contributions from allies piled up, said Latvia’s defence chief.
US announces new military aid for Ukraine, including air defence
The US announced a new $225-million weapons package for Ukraine aimed at shoring up the country’s air defence systems as deadly Russian missiles and drones continued to hit Ukrainian cities.
The new security assistance — announced on Thursday as the Nato summit continued in Washington, DC — features a Patriot missile battery as well as Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, according to a statement from the State Department.
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden announced that Nato allies were together sending Ukraine five long-range air defence systems, including four Patriots and one SAMP-T from Italy.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who was in the US capital meeting Nato leaders this week, has repeatedly asked for badly needed air defence systems to protect civilians, Ukrainian cities and the country’s crucial energy infrastructure.
The need for more air defence systems was brought home on Monday when at least 38 people were killed and nearly 200 wounded in a wave of Russian missile attacks on Ukraine, including a strike that hit the main children’s hospital in Kyiv.
The US security package announced on Thursday, which will be provided under presidential drawdown authority, also includes Javelin anti-armour missiles and more ammunition for the highly valued high mobility artillery rocket systems, or Himars.
EU nations push to censure Hungary’s Orbán over Putin meeting
Half a dozen European Union countries were looking at ways to censure Hungary after Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s freewheeling diplomacy took him on visits to Russia, Ukraine and Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
Ministers from Sweden, Finland, Poland and three Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania will skip informal meetings in Hungary during the first phase of its six-month EU presidency this summer, according to Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson. His government will send lower-level officials instead.
Orbán “is, in effect, abusing the presidency, kidnapping it for his own purposes,” Kristersson told reporters on Thursday at the Nato summit in Washington. “I’ve been very clear that he doesn’t speak for other heads of government, and even less so for the EU system, when he travels to Russia.”
Orbán blindsided Western allies working to present a united front on Ukraine when he travelled to Moscow last week to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Monday, he was in Beijing to see President Xi Jinping. Later on Thursday, Orbán headed from the Nato summit to Florida to meet presumptive Republic presidential nominee and former US president Donald Trump.
White House National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said on Thursday he couldn’t speculate on what Hungary’s prime minister was doing at his meeting with Trump, but denounced diplomatic “adventurism” that didn’t include Ukraine as part of negotiations with Russia.
“All I’ll say is that it certainly isn’t coordinated with Ukrainians,” said Sullivan. “They’ve indicated that they have great misgivings about any effort to negotiate some kind of peace with Russia without the Ukrainians being a part of that effort.”
Budapest took over the six-month rotating presidency of the EU on 1 July, when it chairs meetings between member states and — as an honest broker — leads negotiations on a diverse range of legislative proposals.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander de Croo said on Thursday that Orbán’s diplomatic outreach has erased trust in his country’s presidency.
“The trust is at rock bottom,” De Croo, whose nation held the EU rotating chairmanship until last month, told reporters in Washington. “In a presidency, you need to earn trust every day. Right now, that trust has vanished.”
Remarks from leaders followed a tense meeting of EU ambassadors in Brussels on Wednesday, which lasted more than two hours and saw 25 member states expressing their dismay or anger at how Hungary’s EU presidency had been unfolding, according to an EU diplomat, who declined to be named, requesting anonymity.
Countries condemned Orbán for what they described as his attempt to represent the EU during his visits to Moscow and Beijing and accused him of not playing the role of honest broker, according to a diplomat.
Million-drone effort for Ukraine is moving forward, says Latvia
An initiative to deliver a million drones to Ukraine by next February was moving ahead as contributions from allies piled up, said Latvia’s defence chief.
Defence Minister Andris Spruds said on Thursday the effort spearheaded by the Baltic nation and the UK had secured commitments from a “number of countries” amounting to more than €550-million.
“It’s not the end of the process, additional funding is being announced almost on a weekly basis,” Spruds said in an interview on the sidelines of the Nato summit in Washington.
The group of about 15 countries aims to supply the drones by the three-year mark of the invasion, which began on 24 February 2022. Low-cost drones have become a crucial weapon in Ukraine’s wartime toolkit to hit Russian infantry, armour and artillery positions. They’ve also been used to target naval assets in the Black Sea.
The coalition signed an agreement on Wednesday for a fund and plans to acquire low-cost first-person-view and reconnaissance drones, as well as those using artificial intelligence capability, the ministry said.
“There is ambition to provide all the technologies that Ukraine needs,” Spruds said.
Leaders at the Nato gathering promised five long-range air defence systems for Ukraine in a show of support, even as they resisted offering the country a path toward membership and fresh assessments indicated the conflict with Russia was headed toward indefinite stalemate.
US, Finland, Canada forge icebreaker ship pact to counter Russia, China in Arctic
The US, Finland and Canada were teaming up to share shipbuilding expertise on icebreakers, expecting global demand for the vessels to grow as Russia and China increasingly make aggressive moves in the Arctic.
The three Western countries announced at the Nato summit that they had established the partnership to strengthen their knowledge and make that expertise available to a broader group of allies.
The partnership would “bring world-class expertise and experience to our shipyards that helps them attract demand, scale up their capacity and compete on the world stage,” US Deputy National Security Adviser Daleep Singh told reporters.
“Without this arrangement,” Singh added, “we’d risk our adversaries developing an advantage in a specialised technology with vast geostrategic importance.”
The accord — officially the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort or ICE Pact — marks a response to developments in the Arctic as climate change radically reshapes the security environment, a Canadian government official said in a background briefing with reporters.
Russia and China have encroached on sovereign Canadian territory, with the latter labelling itself a “near-Arctic nation”. Separately, Canada announced at the summit that it was in the market for submarines capable of operating under ice, to shore up its weak defences in the vast region.
Russia, according to a US official, has a fleet of more than 40 icebreakers with more in production — as well as a memorandum of understanding with China to strengthen cooperation in the region. The US, the official said, now has just two icebreakers and they would soon have to be replaced.
US and Germany ‘foiled Russian plot to kill CEO of Rheinmetall’
US and German security services foiled a Russian plot to assassinate the chief executive officer of Rheinmetall, a German arms manufacturer that has been producing ammunition and military vehicles for Ukraine, according to a person familiar with the situation.
US intelligence officials who uncovered the plot informed German security services, that thwarted it, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive information. As a consequence, Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger was given special protection.
The plot was one of a series of Russian plans to kill defence executives in Europe whose companies were supplying Ukraine, according to CNN, which first reported on the assassination plan, citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. The effort to target the Rheinmetall chief “was the most mature”, according to the report.
Rheinmetall is one of the biggest German arms manufacturers and a key supplier for armed forces in Europe. It has seen sales surge amid the growing threat from Russia and questions around the US commitment to the Nato military alliance in case Trump returns to the White House.
Ukraine seizes vessel that had ferried ‘looted’ grain
Ukraine has seized a cargo vessel that it claims has ferried “looted agricultural products” procured from its Russian-occupied territories, the first such action since Moscow’s invasion in 2022.
The vessel, USKO MFU, sailing under a Cameroon flag, had entered and left Sevastopol port to collect agricultural goods, according to a statement on the website of Ukraine’s General Prosecutor. The nation officially stopped using that port after Russia occupied the peninsula in 2014 and it is sanctioned by the European Union and US. The ship’s captain has also been detained.
“The ship repeatedly docked at the seaport of Sevastopol to pick up looted agricultural products” in 2023 and 2024, Ukraine’s Security Services said in a statement on Thursday. The vessel was the first to be seized “since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression”, the country’s top government prosecutor Andriy Kostin said in a statement on social media platform X. “Previously, such arrests were made only in absentia.”
Mehmet Fevzi Usta, an executive of Guha Insaat Mermer Madencilik, which owns the ship, said Ukraine forces boarded the ship as it passed the Sulina Canal and stopped it. He denied that the ship had ever called at the Crimean port. It had used various Russian ports in the past, he said. DM